


Some Facts about Anderson Cooper, and the Pictures that go with Them

by Dhobi ki Kutti (dhobikikutti)



Category: Anderson Cooper 360, Fake News RPF, Pundit RPF, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-02-18
Updated: 2009-02-18
Packaged: 2017-10-03 18:27:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dhobikikutti/pseuds/Dhobi%20ki%20Kutti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A combination of Karanguni's prompts: "Bringing Anderson into the family." and "Behind the scenes and in between shows."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Facts about Anderson Cooper, and the Pictures that go with Them

**Author's Note:**

  * For [karanguni](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=karanguni).



> This was written as a pinch hit for Karanguni for the 2009 Third Monday fic exchange.

#### One

  
[Illus. 1: February 1 2001](http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-february-1-2001/reality-tv)

Jon Stewart has been the most unacknowledged "I have no idea who you're talking about or how he's relevant" influence on Anderson Cooper's equally unacknowledged career as a humourous person with actual personal opinions.

Anderson first saw Jon Stewart when his boyfriend at the time got tickets for them to see The Jon Stewart show as a fun date night thing that the two of them could do together. "You'll like him," his boyfriend had said, "he has a massive inferiority complex, he's smarter than most of his guests and three fourth of the audience doesn't get how biting he really is. And he has almost as weird a giggle as you."

Anderson had sensed the over-harsh lights and snaking cables and camera monitors focus on Jon with the distant resentment of an incognito insider. But this MTV talk show television world was a very different one than the Channel One shows that aired his handycam-footage documentaries. The guest that night had been Cindy Crawford, and she had put some of her special skin cream on the back of Jon Stewart's hand. Anderson's boyfriend had squeezed his hand. They had probably both remembered the minor breakdown Anderson had had after he had come back from Somalia and his boyfriend had commented that his hands were a little rough and maybe he needed to take care of them, and in response, Anderson had pulled out a photo of bodies with skin so blistered and scarred it looked like rubber and said, "so what about the skin care they need?" and neither of them had, in the silence that followed, known whether to laugh or cry.

Anderson had watched his boyfriend roll his eyes when Cindy asked flirtatiously, "Doesn't it feel good?" and then he had to bite back a startled guffaw as Jon Stewart replied, so deadpan it seemed like an instinctive, honest response, "I don't know Cindy, when I have cream on my hands, it's usually on the other side."

After the taping, Anderson and his boyfriend had gone out to dinner, and he had agreed that Jon Stewart was a very funny man. "And hot!" his boyfriend added, and Anderson had shrugged. He had thought about how Jon Stewart seemed to have no problem talking to insecure, has-been musicians on a channel where his fellow comedians were Beavis and Butthead, and turning his cynical distrust of self and world into a healthy, endearing financial asset.

Anderson kept trying to keep up with The Jon Stewart Show through reruns even after his boyfriend had broken up with him, unable to find the patience or strength to deal with Anderson's self-destructive nihilistic news travels. It was a coincidence that ABC offered him a job the same time that Viacom's idiot management got Jon Stewart's show cancelled by stacking it up against Leno and Letterman, but Anderson remembers having a drunk conversation with his ex-boyfriend about 'sticking it out in New York and making it work for Jon's sake', that his ex was too kind to ever mention again.

When Anderson was anchoring World News Now at ABC News in 1999, he was too busy and tired and grumpy at the world to pay close attention to Jon Stewart's increasing success in revamping The Daily Show. He left that job to go do The Mole because he was burnt out and because there had been a 2am epiphany while watching Jon Stewart brilliantly mock the news he had so insipidly tried to present the night before, when he realised he wanted that sense of warmth at work, where people were not numbed by statistics and horrors into being automatons, where it was acceptable to feel a sense of joy about the thing you did, because you didn't need dead children and bombs to do it.

It was his ex-boyfriend and current friend who had mentioned that his show had been featured in a Daily Show segment on the worst reality shows ever, and Anderson had felt a cringing sense of disappointment that he hadn't even when he received a scrupulously polite letter of congratulations on his 'career change' from the Reuters African Bureau Chief Editor who once used to be on his speed dial.

Anderson has never told Jon that it was after watching his 20th September 2001 show that Anderson released a breath he hadn't realised he had held, and then began putting into place the plan that would lead to CNN offering him a job. (It is possible that Anderson has not, consciously, told himself this either. That is the one clip on the Daily Show website that Anderson has not rewatched.)

#### Two

  
[Illus. 2: July 15 2004](http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-july-15-2004/whoop-ass)

Anderson has The Daily Show and The Colbert Report websites bookmarked, even though his tivo at home is set up to tape them, his assistant at work includes them in his daily round up of Media Somehow Relevant To His Job (this includes Doonsbury, wonkette, and xkcd), and he has three friends, (on two different continents –- the ex married a Parisian chef) who email his private, personal account every time Jon or Stephen says his name.

He hated it when Viacom pulled all the clips off of youtube back in 2006, because he used to watch them whenever he needed to flagellate himself, in the middle of editorial meetings that made him part of the problem that Jon and Stephen mocked. When he was out in the field, he'd lean over the shoulder of the soldier or doctor taking a break who would be watching illegally torrented episodes on their laptop (or unit computer, even, who the fuck really cared about copyrights when human rights were being violated on a daily basis?), but he'd try to remain neutral, a fly on the wall, and he'd try very hard not to wince, or giggle.

After the websites were launched, one of Anderson's guilty pastimes has been going into them searching for clips with news anchors' names, and comparing them to the ones that come up with his.

Anderson remembers watching the Whoopi Goldberg clip the night it aired, because for some reason he had the half hour free to sit at watch the Daily Show. He remembers smiling at odd intervals during the next few days, remembering the fake hand off between him and Jon. In an alternate universe, he can think of nothing better than being a field reporter passing stories back to Jon, even if he does have to be a fake and funny one, like Stephen Colbert. (It is a pleasant daydream to think that Jon Stewart's brilliance rubs off on his co-workers, so that, were Anderson to work with him, he would be truly, actually, funny.)

2004 was the year that Anderson had realised how badly he needed Jon Stewart's show, how he wasn't watching it as a professional newsman keeping an eye on the critics, but as a human being who needed some way to process his disgust at his country's political process. (Anderson had never admitted the extent of his agreement with the one-night stand who got him into bed after an enthusiastic discussion at a bar about how The Daily Show was the most gay friendly news show on TV, and if Stewart and Colbert weren't doing it, they damn well should be.)

When The Daily Show had won their second Peabody, Anderson had used his unlisted home phone to call a florist and asked for a small, tasteful bouquet to be delivered to 'Jon Stewart and the Peabody Award Winning Team'.

"Should the card say anything else?" the girl on the phone had asked, after gushing enthusiastically for a minute about how she totally loved the Daily Show too, and wasn't Stephen Colbert cute?!

"No", Anderson had said, "Or wait. Just.... 'Thank you'."


End file.
